Hi everyone and welcome to my blog post! My name is Anna and I am a fourth-year literature student at UBC. I was born in Mainland China and came to Canada with my family at the age of eight, so I guess you could say that I was raised in Canada. At the time when I left China, however, I was old enough that a part of me had already identified with the Chinese culture. Growing up, I’ve always liked to read, but my love for literature didn’t emerge until my high school years. It was then that I came to realize how much impact a book could have on someone, and how much of myself had been built around the stories that had crossed my path since I was young.
This course will give me an opportunity to explore difference mediums of story-telling, from voices that are in the shadows or gradually disappearing from our narratives. Sometimes the most powerful stories are not necessarily told by books, or films. Photographs, for example, can carry the weight of people’s lives within a small frame and in this technological age, stories can travel faster than ever through various sites and forums. All you need is to ignite a spark of interest within the audience, and new world of information can open up at their feet in a matter of seconds.
Despite my love for reading, I often feel that the number of stories I know is minuscule, and my perspectives are horribly limited. Through the use of blogs and comments in this course, I hope to step away from the comforting, familiar corner of stories I’ve collected for myself, and explore ones that are told by different voices, striving to be heard. As a Canadian citizen, I am ashamed to say that I do not know much about the lives and stories of the Indigenous Peoples.
One of the articles in Huffington Post mentioned Trudeau’s speech during the celebration of Canada’s 150, saying, “We recognize that over the past decades, generations, indeed centuries Canada has failed Indigenous Peoples.” However, what does it mean to come to this recognition? What are the actions that can follow once stories have been heard? These are some of the questions that I would like to explore throughout this course with everyone.
Works Cited
Nelson, Jimmy. “Gorgeous Portraits of World’s Vanishing People.” Ted, Ted, Oct. 2014. Web. 11 Jan. 2019. https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_nelson_gorgeous_portraits_of_the_world_s_vanishing_people
Rabson, Mia. “Respect Indigenous Peoples Who Don’t Want to Celebrate Canada 150: Trudeau.” Huffington Post, 30 June 2017. Web. 11 Jan. 2019. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/06/30/respect-indigenous-peoples-who-dont-want-to-celebrate-canada-15_a_23010031/?utm_hp_ref=ca-canada-first-nations
Hi Anna, thank you for your post. It is great to hear that you are excited for how this course will provide you with an opportunity to explore various mediums of storytelling. I definitely agree that photographs often have the power to tell even more about a person or time in history than books do. In addition, in our modernized world, I feel that the human attention span is decreasing more and more and that is why photographs are often easier and more eye-catching than having to read a full story.
The example that you included about Jimmy Nelson travelling through Siberia to photograph the Chukchi people is very thought provoking. The fact that the people wanted to be photographed only once Jimmy got to know them is very symbolic of our relationship with Indigenous People in Canada. It is not fair to write a story about someone and their struggles until you hear their story first hand. That is why I believe storytelling can be so transformational, and life changing. I also appreciated your commentary on Trudeau’s speech during the celebration of Canada’s 150th Anniversary. As I stated in my own blog post, I believe that to come to the recognition for the way that we have failed Indigenous Peoples in the past is to continue the discourse and educate people about this past.
Although it is initially very difficult to relive the dark past, it is vital in order for ignorance to be diminished and for change to be sparked.
I look forward to reading more of your posts throughout this term!
Hi Alexandra,
Thank you for your reply! I really liked your point on the decrease of our attention span and the need for quick gratification, and I also think it’s that need which drives us forward to seek out immediate answers to questions which might be evoked by photographs.
Your comment that said despite the difficulty of reliving a dark past, it is important for us to continue the discourse around the subject of Indigenous Peoples is very insightful. Educating people on a past that no one is proud of is uncomfortable and it would be much easier to remain ignorant, and I appreciated when you said that it is absolutely necessary to take that step in order for us to be on the path to recognition, reconciliation and rehabilitation.
I also look forward to reading more of your blogs and having more conversations with you!
Hi Anna,
Your comment is very insightful and serves as a great personal introduction to our course. I was also around eight years old when I came to live in Canada, and I was able to empathize a lot with what you have written. I am also looking forward to learning more about Indigenous literature and history in this course because I also feel I do not have the profound knowledge of it, which, as a Canadian citizen, I feel I should. The other input from your post that I could identify with is the fact that I was also old enough to remember the language and culture from the country I was born in. I hope that will be an asset for us that we bring with us into our new homeland enriching it with other cultures’ insights and traits that eventually get embedded into the cultural fabric of Canada. I am really looking forward to this Canadian studies and literature course – I feel it is a link that was missing in my understanding of literature.
Hi Dana,
Thank you for your wonderful insights. It is comforting to hear that you can empathize with the feeling of moving to a different country when we have already grown culturally conscious of the one we were born in. It is an interesting experience to be caught between two cultures, and I agree completely with your hope of it being an asset for us to enrich our understanding of Canadian culture. I am also looking forward to this course being a connection between the limited narratives of my knowledge and the undiscovered stories of Canadian literature.
Hey Anna I really enjoyed reading your first blog post! Like you, it was in my teen years that I started to love books, particularly when they made a difference in my life when I really needed it!
I really like the question you asked in your last paragraph. While it’s so important that politicians recognize and publicly acknowledge the Canadian government’s failures of their obligations to Indigenous peoples, their actions do not live up to their words as our government continues to fail nations in a variety of ways. I feel like these statements too often only serve politicians PR and reputations.
Do you find that as students we can sometimes act similarly? learning new perspectives and applying them to our academic lives, but not taking action or making meaningful change to our lives outside school?
I look forward to working with you this term!
Suzanne
Hi Suzanne,
Sorry for taking so long to reply! Thank you for commenting. I look forward to working with you too. 🙂
To answer your questions, yes, I do feel that way. I feel very privileged and spoiled to be able to talk about current issues within a safe classroom setting, and I know that my knowledge on these subjects are often very limited. A lot of the times I feel too ignorant to contribute to these conversations, so I just sit and listen. But sometimes I do feel like some of these conversation has been repeated a lot. Many debated revolved around people’s different opinions on certain subject matters, around what is right and what is wrong, but I think perhaps we can take the conversations into the next step. Instead of simply debating over how the matter should be looked at, we can start talking about what it is we can do to progress, or even just be educated more on the horrors and cruelties that many of these topics contained. I think listening to these issues so much, I’ve gotten a little desensitized to the reality of them, and how horrific they can really be.